Genoa, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Nervi an anthological exhibition on Marino Marini's knights

From July 23 to Nov. 14, 2021, the Gallery of Modern Art in Nervi is hosting the exhibition I cavalieri di Marino Marini, curated by the Marino Marini Foundation, Pistoia, on the occasion of the museum’s reopening with a rearrangement that offers a new reinterpretation of its collections. Thus, in the exhibition spaces earmarked by the new museographic project for temporary exhibitions, an extensive anthological exhibition of the Tuscan artist Marino Marini (Pistoia 1901 - Viareggio 1980), one of the most important and significant Italian sculptors of the twentieth century, finds its place.

The exhibition, focused on the main archetype of his plastic research, the cycle of Horses and Horsemen to which the artist initiated the St. George and the Dragon, created in 1930-31 and preserved at the Civic Museums of Monza, gathers not only sculptures dedicated to this fundamental theme of his long and articulated artistic experience, but also works on paper and paintings. The dialogue between sculpture and drawing-here framed in a broad chronological span, at the extremes of which are the plaster St. James on Horseback of 1939 and the tempera on canvas paper Composition of 1966-attests to the linguistic autonomy of the different forms of expression in Marini’s art, but also to their coherent stylistic and cultural integration.

Equally complex appears to be the inspirational motif of these works, most of which come from the collections of the Marino Marini Foundation in Pistoia, but also from some important private collections, revealing the coexistence in the work of the Tuscan artist of archaism and modernity. In both sculptures, graphics and paintings, Marini succeeded in fact in bringing together references to the tradition of classical sculpture with a personal confrontation with the avant-garde tensions of his time.

With a creative freedom that allowed him, without repetition or moments of fatigue, to experiment and replicate this subject until the 1970s, Marini thus progressively disintegrated the figurative outlines of his horses and riders to give greater prominence to the distribution of plastic masses.

If his research in this area highlights his inclination to confront the technical specificities of different materials, from bronze to terracotta, his engagement in the field of graphics and painting shows his peculiar expressive versatility and his ability to reinterpret in an innovative way the themes dear to him and to re-propose them through unprecedented formal solutions.

The exhibition, which, years after the exhibition dedicated to him in Genoa in the rooms of Palazzo Bianco, offers an overall analysis of the salient phases of Marino Marini’s rich artistic career, and finally inaugurates in the spaces of the renovated Gallery of Modern Art a calendar of exhibitions dedicated to Italian artists of the 19th and 20th centuries and to the main expressive trends of the period of research documented by the museum’s collections.

For all information you can visit the official website of the Genoa Museums.

Pictured: the exhibition layout.

Genoa, at the Gallery of Modern Art in Nervi an anthological exhibition on Marino Marini's knights

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